Interprofessional Teamwork Paper

Interprofessional teamwork has become essential part of health care system in order to improve the quality of care. Many researches has suggested that collaboration of health care workers has impacted the patient care outcome in a positive way, as well as assisting to avoid errors by, “watching each other’s backs” (Cherry & Jacob, p 398). Furthermore, “Important indicators of safety, patient care, and environment of care, such as complications and error rate, length of hospital stay, conflict among caregivers, staff turnover, and mortality rate, have all been shown to decrease in collaborative care environment” (Green & Johnson, 2015, p. 2)

In recent years, nurses are in front line in running health care in USA. According to Lomax and White (2015), the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the report stating that in order to provide safe and high-quality care, it is crucial for nursed to collaborate with other health care professionals (para. 6). Cherry and Jacob emphasizes that “With teamwork and collaboration as a core competency for nursing practice,

The range of different knowledge, skills, and experiences can enrich the team toward better outcome (Cherry & Jacob, 2015, p. 301). Collaboration has become very important in health care system to manage complex and chronically ill patients. Even though, interprofessional teamwork has shown positive outcome to maintain a quality of care, such as decreasing error occurrence, length of stay, and mortality rate; however, the positive outcome depends on the effectiveness of the team. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the U.S. Department of Defense has developed a program TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) to improve the communication and skills to increase the effectiveness of a team (Cherry & Jacob, 2015, p.